Review
THE CEDAR SURF: AN INFORMAL HISTORY OF SURFING IN BRITISH COLUMBIA
Grant Shilling
New Star Books, 88 pp.
"A greater risk than getting cold is getting ‘slammed’ by a wave and having the wind knocked out of you, getting ‘washing machined’ or ‘stuffed’ – driven under the water by a wave coming down on you and having to wait to catch your breath," writes Grant Shilling in The Cedar Surf. "The weight of water falling on your head, when you get caught by the lip of a three-foot wave, is about 800 kilograms."
Welcome to B.C.’s "wet" coast, where the water temperature never goes above 11 C and you won’t want to go surfing without a wetsuit.
Still, B.C. surfers have been paddling out to catch waves for over 40 years and author Shilling depicts a hardy sub-culture that, though geographically challenged compared to its Pacific cousins further south, still heads out into the chilly surf off Vancouver Island’s remote west coast.
Shilling’s book offers a wild ride through B.C.’s surf culture, exploring the history and practice of surfing in the province, from Jim Sadler and the other hardy pioneers who started it all to the sport’s role today as an important economic contributor to local coastal economies. The Cedar Surf is about surf shacks, back roads, bushwhackers, hitchhikers and squatters in the rainforest isolation in and around Tofino, Ucluelet and Jordan River, where surfing beaches are crowded with sea lions, not people.
Sadler was among the first to brave B.C.’s icy tides. In 1948, he headed out on horseback from Olds, Alberta and arrived in Victoria after two months and three days, with $1.10 in his pocket and visions of God. By 1965, he was riding the waves at Bamfield on a plywood surfboard with rounded edges.
When Shilling himself first arrived to partake in West Coast water sports, he bodysurfed naked. Eventually a legendary local surfer named Ralph Tieleman got tired of Shilling always borrowing his board and finally gave it to him. Tieleman had a long-distance crush on a girl named Kim in L.A. and the name of the punk band she played in adorned the board. Shilling still calls it "The Muff."
The Cedar Surf is the tenth in New Star Books’ Transmontanus series – a collection of books on British Columbia with subjects ranging from the early Vancouver punk-rock scene to the famous inland redfish, the kokanee sockeye salmon – and was edited by series contributor Terry Glavin.
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